Media centers focus on growth -of people, knowledge, ideas

It seems like there's a new media center at every turn in the road, er, uh, information highway. So how do you know who to turn to for what kind of help?

We interviewed several of the newspaper folks running programs at the Freedom Forum, the Media Center at the American Press Institute and the Poynter Institute, to find out where they're headed, where they're different, and what they can do for you.

The Freedom Forum
Frequent flyer programs were designed for people like Adam Clayton Powell III, a former West Coast consultant who has been vice president, technology and programs for the Freedom Forum of Arlington, Va., for the last four years.

In that time, he has been organizing technology seminars -- 28 this year -- around the world on "topics that people used to call science fiction," he mused.

In its early days of addressing digital newsroom technologies, the Freedom Forum focused on hands-on training for reporters and editors -- work that has since been taken on by API, Poynter and others, said Powell.

He stressed that the Freedom Forum continues to collaborate with a range of groups at national, and where appropriate, local levels -- including API, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Radio Television News Directors Association, the Associated Press Managing Editors Association, the Association for Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication, and the Newspaper Association of America.

For example, all the classes that come through API for training get an (often heated) afternoon session on First Amendment issues at the nearby Freedom Forum, he said.

In recent times, however, the Freedom Forum has narrowed its focus to content, and how technology can affect its creation and distribution. One outgrowth of this focus was the Newseum, which was originally part of Powell's enterprise.

"We didn't set out to build what the Newseum has become -- we have thousands of visitors a day from the general public," Powell said. Now the Newseum offers daily programs featuring a journalist of the day (past speakers have included Cokie Roberts of ABC News and Helen Thomas of United Press International), weekly author series, and CyberSunday, a public component to conferences.

At the Journalism and the Internet conference held in January in collaboration with the National Press Club, the Newseum was host to more than 1500 unanticipated visitors. Many of them were children, and people from other countries (represented by the six in a row who lined up at the open mike to ask questions).

The Freedom Forum is rooted in western New York.

In 1935, newspaper publisher Frank Gannett endowed the newspaper foundation bearing his name with 1500 shares of Gannett Co. stock. By 1984, that endowment had grown to $390 million; five years later, the foundation moved from its original headquarters in Rochester, N.Y., to Arlington, Va. (shortly after Gannett Co. Inc. moved to Arlington).

In 1991, the Gannett Foundation sold its 10 percent ownership of Gannett Co. Inc. for $670 million and changed its name to the Freedom Forum. Today, with nearly $900 million in diversified assets, the Freedom Forum is the largest foundation in the United States dedicated exclusively to media and First Amendment issues.

In the last four or five years, Powell said, the Freedom Forum has defined its primary niche as journalism and First Amendment issues -- looking at First Amendment issues on the Internet in this country, as well as how other countries control Internet-based media. For example, in January, the Freedom Forum sponsored a forum on coverage of politics for Asian broadcast station managers.

This focus has led to work with the Internet Society (also in Virginia), with the MIT Media Lab, and with the Multimedia Research Center at the University of Southern California, as well as with other university partners. Projects have examined control of content by both Asian and European governments. Seminar sites have ranged from San Francisco to Nashville to New York, as well as London, Berlin, Hong Kong, Johannesburg and a few, even more exotic, locales.

Last October, the Freedom Forum sponsored a conference on coverage of science and technology -- held on the 40th anniversary of Sputnik.

Maintaining a focus is the hardest part of the work he and his colleagues do, Powell said.

"Conferences are only a part of what we do. The research done by our professionals-in-residence often leads up to particular conferences where they are able to present their findings. Then their books come out, they continue their research at the university, and then we follow up on what they've learned with another conference."

The Media Center
For more than 50 years, the American Press Institute has sought to "provide training of the highest quality for newspaper men and women (and) help them improve the quality of their newspapers."

API courses are "total-immersion, peer-to-peer learning" -- highly focused, targeted to impart specific skills and built with extensive input from newspaper professionals about just what they need, said William Winter, API's president and executive director.

"If we do our work properly with the individuals who attend API, their newspapers automatically will improve, both in quality of content and in their profitability," he said.

API is committed to using "the most up-to-date techniques, principles and technologies," so in its seminars, you're likely to find the latest educational technologies, particularly at its home in Reston, Va. API conducts an Executive Development Program and offers fellowships, and on-line and in-residence seminars to journalism educators and newspaper employees.

API was formed in 1946, when 38 newspapers created a founding fund for the initial series of seminars at the urging of Sevellon Brown, then editor and publisher of the Providence (R.I.) Journal and Evening Bulletin.

The first seminars were held in New York at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In 1974, the institute built its own center in Reston, which was expanded in 1980. Another expansion is endowed and in the planning stages.

To help newspapers deal with new media issues, the institute has developed a progressively more sophisticated program that has included seminars on managing on-line operations within the newspaper environment and on-line media management for business-side issues. This year, those earlier efforts have evolved into two seminars, Defining On-line Content and New Media, New Money.

API also is joining with the Rochester Institute of Technology to offer a seminar on digital imaging for newspapers, to be held on RIT's campus in Rochester, N.Y.

For some time, obviously, API has been aware of the need to focus on the growing importance of technology, the multiplicity of information sources created by new technologies, and the opportunities newspapers enjoy -- and the threats they face -- because of rapidly evolving technological innovation.

The latest sign of this awareness is the Media Center.

Winter explained that in the midst of a $10 million endowment campaign, a visit with Vivian Vahlberg at the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation led to a discussion "about the real need for an organization such as API to train people at all levels of the business in the opportunities within the whole field of new media."

Out of those discussions came a three-year, $729,000 grant to create the Media Center at API.

"Our basic charge from the Tribune Foundation," said Winter, "was to help newspapers 'think out of the box' when it comes to new media. That's what we're trying to do."

Media Center Director Christopher Feola said the center's charter is to offer new media training -- both within and beyond the framework of traditional API residential seminars -- and to lead the industry into the Information Age. "In other words," said Feola, "our focus is entirely on technology and new media."

(Feola has been a correspondent for The Cole Papers since 1993, four years before he went to the Media Center from the Waterbury Republican-American in Connecticut.)

Among the projects Feola described tackling are new user interfaces for news, including a three-dimensional data interface, and the avatar interface, which uses voice control to manipulate a set of independent objects that offer text-to-speech synthesis and non-linear navigation.

There's also a new media track, which will offer training for students ranging from beginners to senior executives, and efforts to develop a realistic on-line business model.

And conferences. The center will host a confab on classifieds this summer, modeled on last October's Founder's Conference (see The Cole Papers, December 1997) -- both designed, according to Winter, "to bring some of the best minds in the newspaper business together with smart folks from other industries to thrash out ways in which newspapers can perform more effectively in the new media arena."

A planned metastudy will assemble existing classified research and test its scientific validity, with a post-conference follow-up study to carry out original research commissioned by the conference.

New on-line products are planned, to help newspapers "better understand the weird world of on-line communication and commerce," as Winter described it. That's meant a series of new, five-week, on-line seminars (via the Internet) over the past year -- four for newsroom personnel, with others for advertising, circulation and marketing employees.

Nearly 500 people have taken part, and despite the technical problems (largely related to firewalls) typical at start up, said Winter, "the vast majority of program graduates have rated the seminars highly and said they'd like to take another one on-line."

All of these efforts will be helped greatly by a $5.2 million grant API recently received from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation to totally renovate and expand the Reston facility.

"A key part of the renovation will be installation of new educational technology," said Winter. "Wired? We'll be wired!"

But Feola believes that one of the most important roles the center will play -- certainly with the longest-term implications for the industry -- is in developing a grammar and rhetoric for new media.

And by that he means ... ?

"If you think about it," Feola explained, "each new medium has struggled to develop its own grammar. Early movies, for example, were pretty much shot by dropping a camera on a tripod and performing a play in front of it.

"Contrast that with, say, NYPD Blue, where the camera work has become an integral part of the way the story is told. Handheld cameras, jump cuts, sound tracks -- these are all parts of the movie/video grammar that did not exist when the medium was invented."

As Winter sees it, the overarching goal is "to help newspaper journalists understand evolving forms of communication. We want them to understand how to maintain the best of traditional newspaper standards and values within a new delivery format, or within a wide range of such formats.

"That's a real trick," he added. "But it can be -- in fact, must be -- done if we're to maintain free-press values and have newspapers carry out their critical role in society. "

The Poynter Institute for Media Studies
Poynter is committed to addressing the rapidly changing world of journalism, along the way capturing examples of excellence, and standing for journalism that informs and enlightens public discourse, said Kenneth Irby, associate for photojournalism at the institute based in St. Petersburg, Fla.

The mission is manifested through teaching -- and inspiring -- journalists and media managers.

Nora Paul, director of the library at Poynter, explains that while API, for example, has looked at issues surrounding marketing, circulation and the business side, as well as the newsroom, Poynter's focus has been largely on work in the newsroom. And while the Freedom Forum and New Directions for News have specialized in convening forums, Poynter has focused on training, she noted.

The institute came into being in 1975 as the Modern Media Institute, a place where Nelson Poynter, publisher of the St. Petersburg Times and founder of Congressional Quarterly, could sponsor work to elevate the standards of journalism through training and education. By 1989, Poynter had expanded its offerings to include programs of interest to TV and radio journalists.

Poynter's academic program focuses broadly on four areas and the intersections among them: reporting, writing and editing; visual journalism; leadership and management, and media ethics.

Newspapers have moved well past the early days when just dealing with the arrival of hardware in the newsroom was a major issue, and Poynter began taking on new media issues well before 1994. Current new media course offerings include On-line Design, Leading and Producing On-line News, New Research and The Newsroom, and Reporting with the Internet. On-line topics are integrated into standing courses as well.

But Poynter is also working to move to the next level, to explore and articulate the next wave of issues that newsrooms will encounter as the world of new media continues to expand.

"It's important to find out what existing groups have accomplished," said Paul, "and then to locate the gaps in the work done by existing new media groups, as well as what issues the people who are actually 'committing journalism' are actually dealing with. We need to converse with journalism organizations, with members, with committees who are grappling with these issues, to consolidate good thinking."

The institute needs "to balance between what we already know and being constant learners, and then being the best venue for sharing that knowledge," she said.

As part of those efforts, said Irby, "several of our faculty members are going to spend time at web companies to study and learn about the issues." And a faculty committee -- consisting of Paul and Irby, as well as William Boyd II (leadership, new technologies and managing diversity), Christopher Scanlon (writing programs) and Robert Steele (assistant dean and director, ethics programs) -- has produced more concrete suggestions. Among them: